


collection of poetry

by seagog



Category: Original Work
Genre: Poetry
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-14
Updated: 2019-04-14
Packaged: 2020-01-13 10:19:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 1,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18466963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seagog/pseuds/seagog
Summary: I have a love-hate relationship with poetry. This is a place for keeping my trove of wildly unrelated, tonally disconnected poems.





	1. Benefits of Walking at Night

From the hours of eleven to three, Beijing smudges at the corners,   
darkens its grays with black spit.  
The first time I snuck out of the house,   
my footsteps were muted, shrunken.  
I walked laps through the park and between the neat rows of houses,  
collecting mosquito bites like stray wildflowers,  
pushing through air warm and thick as the insides of a greenhouse.  
Under a sky that was blacker than black,  
the well-trodden paths of my neighborhood shaped themselves into mazes anew.  
I think they were trying to amuse me.  
(I never did find where the maze ended.)  
One time, I ran into a neighbor stretching in his front lawn.  
His head was cocked to the side; his right arm reached for the moon.  
I thought I’d stumbled upon a monster,   
something inhuman with a long white neck.  
It was one of those things that become staggeringly funny five minutes after they happen.  
If the night had been a little darker, I would have walked right past him.  
A little brighter, and I would have seen it was only a man.  
When I came around the second time that night, he was gone.  
Another time, I saw a small animal moving in the grass.  
I came as close as I could without scaring it off.  
In the absence of light, I could see nothing but its fur and the round shape of its body.  
I chased it up the slope of the hill,  
watched it duck into the bushes.  
In the light, it could have been brown or gray or white,   
but right then, it was black.  
This is not to say that there is not a lot of gray in Beijing.  
Gray are the skies, are the buildings, are the clouds.  
There was one point in history where I took to wearing dust masks on the short walk to the bus.  
According to _The Economist_ , living in Beijing for one day is equal to smoking forty cigarettes.  
This is a lie, but an enjoyable lie.  
There’s a specific kind of pleasure that comes from self-pity.  
When you sit in the passenger seat and look out the window,   
it’s hard to see more than fifty feet ahead through all that gray.  
Mix any color with gray, and you’ve got yourself a _tone_.  
The hue stays the same, but the vibrancy dies a flaccid death.  
(This is a truth I learned in art class, blending acrylics into mud.)  
It’s only under the sprawl of night that all these ugly tones scamper back into their hiding places.  
When you mix a color with black, it’s called a _shade_.  
The night drowns me in more shades than I could ever swallow and I am grateful for it.


	2. thalassophobia

legs weightless in the deep blue light  
the mouth of the old world yawns below me  
sonorous whale-drone of Saharan breath  
sends tremors through the cold like   
the anticipatory drumbeat   
of that first   
bite

i am  
the juice  
pooling on your tongue all sticky sweet  
taunt of Georgia peaches in the crest of July

a hundred thousand million feet under  
an eye opens in the chasm  
round and ribbed with primordial yellow  
those human marvels of titanic proportion  
are claustrophobic here

empty is only a word until you're   
sunken where the sand cannot hear you  
and you cannot recall  
why you brushed your teeth this morning  
spat the white foam down the drain  
watched it swirl  
carry away the refuse of your tongue  
down to this place

this place  
is the last wild thing  
it lurks in pockets above  
behind aquarium acrylic  
a drop of a drop of a drop  
but here it comes undone  
and it does not hate, does not hunger  
it simply  
is

 

 

have you ever seen a thing  
so vast


	3. Conversations with my Television

You’re telling me, _you wouldn't steal a car._

But I'm not paying attention. I'm waiting  
for Barbie to come on. Straight-to-DVD, the newest one  
about twelve ballerina sisters. Or is it twenty-four?  
The instrumental is stuck in my head. I’m dancing  
on the legs of a swan. Throw rose petals over me  
while I'm asleep, won’t you.

Now you’re playing trailers,  
dumb trailers about people kissing and crying  
and saving the world. I wish I could fast forward.  
Outside, the California sun is a fringe of white lace and there's something  
in taking it for granted.  
There's something in picking up the blue plastic chair in the living room  
and sloshing it side to side, up and down,  
listening to all that water  
swishing inside.

I couldn’t pick you up like that.  
You are a great big thing, boxy and wide,  
nothing the slim fixture that hangs in my dentist’s office.  
When you play episodes of Pokemon,  
I don’t understand what you’re saying but  
I really, really do.

You’re showing my favorite morning cartoon. I’m eating  
cereal, floating three inches off the carpet,  
a sunburn crawling up my back.  
I must look like a barnyard animal  
to you. About to reach through your screen with my cloven hoof  
and pull out your slimy, icky guts.  
Well, you should be scared of me.  
I can do anything.

Yesterday I built a castle out of popsicle sticks  
and broke up a proletariat revolution before lunch.  
I read a whole chapter book  
and turned into a bottlenose dolphin  
and rode my horse into the aspen to hide from the king’s guard.  
I haven’t mastered the monkey bars yet  
but when I do, the world will tremble before me.

Tomorrow I will steal a car.


	4. Luna

Tell me this:  
How long does it take to reach the place where the earth touches the sky?  
The place where sharp teeth burst from the ground  
to take a bite of the white-peach moon.  
Eyes rolled back, neck cricked,   
I trace an X in the dark spot where the sun used to hang.

The pebbles whine under my rubber-soled shoes,  
calling me away from my plot of faraway treasure  
and back to the smell of dandelions squirming in the mud,  
of rock sitting placid in square shapes,  
of the damp pizza box wedged in the dirt.  
Somebody has sown dark grease patches into the white cardboard,  
and somebody else has stepped on its corner,  
folding it flat against the sidewalk,  
where it seeks the company of dead leaves.

The trees are to blame.  
They are frantic as they swallow space that does not belong to them,  
their gnarled fingers branching and splintering,  
their cracked skins dancing with a parade of miniature soldiers  
who have pledged allegiance to a cruel general.  
Birds conspire in their top boughs,  
only a little distance from the ground but  
emboldened nonetheless.  
I hear them whisper in whistle-tones,  
waging a war against the rabbits,  
trading the hidden places where worms grow.

As I move under their evil intent,  
a red light catches my eye and keeps it,  
flicks it from hand to hand,  
clenches it between its teeth like a gumball.  
Red pulses from behind a windowpane.  
Inside, there is a man with a crooked spine  
and an armful of photographs,  
making no noise except for the curses that slip  
out the sides of his curved mouth.  
There is a picture of the moon  
and the lady that sits atop it,  
listening to the rabble  
to pass the time.


End file.
